After a decade without them, school report cards will be issued in December. And for the first time in more than a decade, schools will be given a letter grade.

Under development for five years, school report cards will contain information on how well students are learning, overall achievement in math and reading, graduation rates, and whether a school is struggling with getting kids to attend school.

The law requiring schools to be given letter grades was passed in 2012, and its sponsor, Rep. Terri Collins, R-Decatur, is looking forward to the release.

Over the past five years, Collins has worked on multiple task forces to work out the details and has kept a positive outlook despite the length of time it has taken to decide on a final format.

"My patience comes from the fact that I truly wanted to get it right, not just get it done," Collins said.

Collins said she recently met with state education officials and is pleased with the information included on the report card.

State officials have released no prototypes of what the report card will look like, but have said it will be in an online dashboard format.

The state report card for 2016-2017 will contain only the indicators required in state law, and the report card containing those required by federal law will be published separately.

Education officials planned to keep the state and federal report cards separate, but interim state superintendent Dr. Ed Richardson nixed that idea, saying it's too confusing to have two different report cards.

Richardson told local superintendents in a memo dated Nov. 9 that future report cards, beginning with the 2017-2018 school year, will contain both state and federally-required information. Superintendents will get a look at what the unified report card will look like not later than the end of December.

The last time Alabama issued school report cards was for the 2006-2007 school year. Those report cards met both state and federal requirements under the No Child Left Behind law.

At that time, the report cards were being printed and shipped to schools across the state, and costs were mounting.

Former state superintendent Dr. Joe Morton told AL.com in an email that financial pressures that began during the 2007-2008 school year caused state officials to rethink how best to compile and distribute the information required by both state and federal law.

Ultimately, all accountability reporting was made available through the state department's website, and no more report cards were printed.

The elements that were part of a school's report card were scattered across the department's website, making it difficult for parents and community members and the media to get the full picture of what was happening within a school.

In the years following, test results and measures of "adequate yearly progress," required by federal law, were easy to access and often formed the basis of media reports, but that focus on test scores is too narrow, critics of school grading systems say.

Collins said the multiple measures and indicators, beyond test results, that will be on Alabama's new school report card give a more well-rounded view of what is happening in schools.

Educators, administrators, parents and legislators have been at the table during discussions of what would be published on the final report card, and their voices have been heard, Collins said.

Alabamians are used to seeing public schools and public education rank low nationwide. Educators worry these new grades will do more of the same, seeing the grades to further beat down already struggling schools.

The intent has never been to use ratings as a hammer, Collins said, but to use the information to continuously improve schools. "How will we get better," she asked, "if we never acknowledge where we really are right now and have a goal to improve?"

Collins said she has seen prototypes of the new report card, and believes it reveals a more well-rounded picture of what happens in a school.

Thomas Rains, Vice President of Operations and Policy for the A Plus Education Partnership, sees value in school report cards. "It's really a matter of putting that information out there and owning it," he said. "[It's] for the schools and the parents and the taxpayers to be able to see and understand how their schools are performing."

Rains said the information can help pinpoint which schools need the most support as well as help parents choose a school for their child.

Board member Mary Scott Hunter, R-Huntsville, said she is looking forward to having a report card again because, she said, "We need to be telling our own story. If we don't, others will tell our story for us."

Hunter referenced school ratings site like GreatSchools.org that use publicly available data on their web sites to compare performance of schools.

While no date has been set for release, Richardson told board members on Nov. 9 he plans to bring the final report card to them at their next meeting, Dec. 14.

The deadline for releasing both the state and federal report cards for 2016-2017 is Dec. 31.

Separate and apart from state law, federal law has its own reporting requirements. Federal law requires states to report measures of equity, such as how many qualified teachers are in each school and what percentage of students in the school took required tests, and Alabama is way behind getting that information online.

In 2016, after finding Alabama no longer published the indicators required under federal law, federal officials placed a condition on Alabama's federal Title I funding used to administer education for students in poverty after finding state officials weren't providing required information to the public. The condition remains in place, but no funding has been withheld.

Federal officials can impose conditions on federal funding to get state officials to comply with state law, but it is rare that funds are ever actually withheld.

AL.com reported on this in 2016 when state officials published a 1,074-page report card for the 2014-2015 school year online. Another 400 pages were added in February to complete the requirements.

Both the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 federal report cards will be online before the end of the year, education officials said, and will likely be just as large, containing more than a thousand pages, but will be streamlined in the future as a part of the unified report card.

As for the state report card, Collins said, "At the end of the day, nobody may think [all of the indicators on the report card are] the best thing in the whole wide world." But, she said, the report will provide multiple measures and indicators of student achievement, which is what schools should be aiming for.

Rains, too, cautions parents and policymakers to remember that whatever indicators are on the report card only give a partial view of what's happening in a school, but does believe the information will be valuable. "This is one more piece of a very complicated puzzle," Rains said.

"All of us in Alabama are stakeholders in public education in one way or another," Rains said. "This is important information for us to have to improve and get better."

1/31/2018 - Updated to clarify that schools have previously been given an overall letter grade, but not since 2001.